The Richest Woman in America (24 page)

Such was the case when she was sued for a mortgage she had purchased years before. In 1873, Hetty had loaned $150,000 for a mortgage, and after three years of nonpayment the bank foreclosed; she bought the property at a bargain price. By 1890 its value had grown to $1 million and the original owners challenged her in court. A federal judge in Chicago dismissed the lawsuit and the property remained in her hands.

More than a century later the
New York Times
reported, “
Loans on Distressed Properties Become a Burden and an Opportunity.” The 2009 story referred to the Drake Hotel in Manhattan, owned by real estate magnate Harry Macklowe, who had suffered from the severe credit crunch and defaulted on his loans. As the paper pointed out, however, the hotel itself was not for sale; what was available was a $200 million mortgage. “If Macklowe defaults on that mortgage, the owner of the mortgage will be in the best position to take ownership of the property,” said the
Times
.

      
N
umerous defaults took place in 1890. In August that year, the U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Silver Act, ordering the Treasury to make monthly purchases of four and a half million ounces of silver produced in the West and turn it into coins. But foreign governments
did not view silver as equal to gold and two months later the country suffered the consequences.

Baring Brothers, the most important financial institution in London after the Bank of England, had lost millions of dollars on South American adventures. The usually conservative bank had put aside its cautious approach and taken high risks in Argentina and Uruguay. When the investments collapsed, Baring’s holdings plummeted.

The bank paid the price, and Americans paid too. No longer able to use its foreign investments as collateral, Baring Brothers, a major investor in U.S. railroads, was forced to sell its shares in American stocks. In return, it demanded its money back in gold, draining some of the gold supply. Even worse, rumors spread that Baring Brothers had failed. On Wall Street, men’s teeth chattered and their knuckles turned white as they contemplated the meaning of such a cataclysmic event.

The stock market dropped, and real estate prices fell with it. Hetty and other shrewd financiers found bargains galore. In Chicago, Hetty bought up mortgages. In New York, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie bought Madison Square Garden for only $400,000. Fortunately, Baring Brothers was rescued, and after a year the American markets seemed more secure. New Yorkers built bigger, more splendid mansions all along Fifth Avenue and rode in their horse-drawn carriages uptown. At Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, Andrew Carnegie built his new Music Hall for $1.25 million. Over the course of a week in May 1891, thousands of people packed the auditorium: Walter Damrosch led the orchestra in a Beethoven overture; the Oratorio Society’s voices rang out; and Tchaikovsky conducted his
Festival Coronation March
.

      
C
ulture flourished and commerce boomed in Chicago too: the city was the focal point of the railroads, “
the Rome of the Great West,” as the writer Charles Dudley Warner called it. Chicago was “the place where most of the great lines meet,” where agriculture was shipped, where cattle were congregated, where raw materials merged, and where the rolling stock was produced to transport it all. Chicago’s industries were thriving, its population increasing to over a million people, its business surpassing a billion dollars a year.

Against strenuous competition from St. Louis, Washington, and New York, Chicago had won the right to hold the Columbian Exposition: the World’s Fair, a celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. To do so, it promised to raise $10 million through stocks and bonds. Opening in 1893, the World’s Fair, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park, included two hundred buildings in the beaux arts style; it hosted forty-three countries and in less than a year attracted twenty-six million people, almost half the nation’s population.

The fair made an impact on every aspect of American life, from agriculture and advertising to transportation and technology, from manufacturing and marketing to classrooms and culture. Families saw the brilliance of electricity that would transform their homes and workplaces, children heard the pledge of allegiance they would soon recite in schools, and everyone sent postcards home to their friends. They chewed on Juicy Fruit gum, slurped the new Cream of Wheat, munched on hamburgers, shrieked on the Ferris wheel, and heard the oompah-pah of John Philip Sousa’s marching songs. Antonín Dvoǐák and Scott Joplin, who composed music as varied as the
New World Symphony
and ragtime, and writers such as Henry Adams and L. Frank Baum, who wrote books as different as
The Education of Henry Adams
and
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, were all inspired by the exposition.

The fair brought to life de Tocqueville’s earlier writings on America’s “exceptional” and “eminently democratic” system—the egalitarian, individualistic, and free spirit that made it unique. American exceptionalism, a term recently revived, recalls the country’s remarkable character, its atmosphere bursting with artistic, creative, industrial, and technological brilliance. The country in general, and Chicago in particular, was rich with opportunities and Hetty scooped them up like pennies raining down from heaven. “My mother was business, business, business,” said Ned.

      
I
hate business,” Hetty told a reporter. “I just attend to it for my children’s sake. I would a great deal rather be a society woman.” As much time and effort as Hetty spent doing well in the business world,
her friend Annie Leary spent doing good in the social world. Annie was the Jekyll to Hetty’s Hyde. A philanthropist and fun-loving woman who crammed her days with lunches, teas, and charitable events and filled her evenings with dinner parties, dances, concerts, and balls, she raised money for the poor, aided Italian immigrants in Greenwich Village, created schools, commissioned public art works, and generously supported the Catholic Church.

As much attention as Hetty gave to her son Ned, Annie gave to Hetty’s daughter Sylvie.
Like Henry James’s character in
Washington Square
, the widowed Dr. Sloper, who disdained his daughter, Hetty might have said, “Try to make a clever woman of her. I should like her to be a clever woman.” And like Sloper’s sister, Aunt Lavinia, Annie tried. At her home at 90 Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks north of Washington Square, the lighthearted spinster took Sylvie under her wing. Determined that she be given a proper introduction to society, Annie acted as Sylvie’s chaperone. She supervised the selection of her wardrobe and oversaw the numerous fittings of tailored luncheon suits, floating tea dresses, beaded evening gowns, ball gowns, plumed hats, wraps, gloves, and ostrich feather fans required of any debutante, even the thickset, six-foot Sylvie.

Although Hetty may have frowned at the thought of her daughter swathed in expensive taffetas and tulles, she understood the social rituals. “As for society,” she said, “I believe in it. When a young woman, I went out a great deal myself.” She clarified her words: “I don’t think society means what some rich people would have us believe. I should get very tired of living in one of the great houses in New York, going out all night and sleeping all day. They don’t have any real pleasure. It’s intercourse with people that I like.”

But while Hetty was a clever conversationalist when she chose to be, her daughter was too self-conscious to speak up. Although many considered her intelligent, her sad countenance and dour disposition made some regard her as Dr. Sloper viewed his own offspring: “My daughter is a wealthy woman with a large fortune,” he said. “She is about as intelligent as a bundle of shawls.”

Witty or not, Sylvie took part in Annie Leary’s more sociable world. Miss Leary was described in
Town and Country
magazine as “an ideal hostess [who] takes the greatest interest in the lighter side
of life.” Her Thursday at-homes featured musical performances; her dinner parties were decorated by Hodgson and catered by Pinard; her after-dinner guests were entertained by Lander’s Orchestra. What’s more, the sewing circle she started, which ran year after year from Lent to Easter, was noted in the papers and copied by other prominent ladies. Once a fortnight, the group of debutantes—dance class students of Mrs. Stebbins’s, who trained their bodies “to express a beautiful soul,” or of Mrs. Shrady’s, who taught them the more traditional waltz—gathered in Miss Leary’s drawing room. In between gossip and giggles they stitched simple clothes to donate to hospitals, homes, and prisons.

In the redbrick house she shared with her bachelor brother Arthur, an accomplished athlete, fine dancer, and successful businessman, Annie introduced the twenty-year-old Sylvie to the Learys’ friends, their daughters, and their unmarried sons. It may not have been a trumpeted coming out, but dressed in a debutante’s virginal gown, Sylvie stepped timidly into a round of social events at which she was constantly on display, expected to flaunt her charms and attract her future husband.

The Patriarchs’ Ball she attended in January 1892 dazzled the guests and the press. Held at Delmonico’s at the height of the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain dubbed the era, it occurred at the start of the year, when Ward McAllister announced his famous list of Four Hundred. The most exclusive register of New York society was “
not unlike Dante’s description of Paradise,” said Mrs. Winthrop Astor Chanler, one of its members.

Along with James Roosevelt, Withington Whitehouse, Matthew Astor Wilks, and an assemblage of Astors, Geolets, Peabodys, and Pells, the fashionable Mr. Arthur Leary, an original member of the Patriarchs, together with Miss Leary and Miss Green, arrived to find Delmonico’s awash in pink. Garlands of pink roses filled the ballrooms and festooned the chandeliers; the tables were bursting with bouquets of roses and orchids. Pink flowers and lush plants bloomed everywhere, and rare ferns and palm fronds quivered in the nooks.

Almost all the 150 invited guests attended a Metropolitan Opera performance and then swooped in at 11:30 p.m., danced for an hour, and sat down to a dinner of roast duck and English wines. Later, not
one but two orchestras, the Hungarian band in the red ballroom and Lander’s in the white and gold room, provided music for the many couples who performed the cotillion. At 3:30 a.m. the strains of “Goodnight Ladies” wafted through the air. Sylvie, ungainly in her delicate dress, uncomfortable in her dancing shoes, joined the rest of the guests as they put on their wraps and faded away. She had endured her first Patriarchs’ Ball. Like Edith Jones (the future Edith Wharton) a few years later, she had suffered through “
the long cold agony of shyness”; she had survived, but she did not succumb to the Patriarchs again.

Still, there were the requisite dinners, for which an invitation, said Ward McAllister, “is a social obligation.
If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.” And there were special occasions, such as the evening hosted by Mme. de Barrios, widow of the Guatemalan president, who transformed her drawing room into a theater and provided her guests, including Arthur and Annie Leary, Mrs. Green and Miss Green, with an operatic performance of
Faust
. When the Italian orchestra commenced to play and the red velvet curtain rose, the audience gushed at the cottage, the gate, and the gardens created on the miniature stage. Later, at supper provided by Sherry’s, they had a chance to chat with the hostess, bedecked in opals and diamonds, and appraise her new fiancé, Señor de Roda. But a few months later, when word leaked that Sylvie Green had a suitor, Hetty found little to celebrate.

Annie Leary had invited the diffident Sylvie to spend the month of
August in Newport. The ocean resort, reached by train and then by connecting boat, was the favorite watering hole of the upper crust. Residents and visitors alike rushed from one activity to another and changed their clothes as frequently as butterflies flutter their wings. With Annie as her guide, the lumbering Sylvie might take a leisurely breakfast in flowered cottons, change into her riding habit for a morning ride, and then don her bathing clothes for the ladies’ swimming hour on Bailey’s Beach. There were informal lunches in pretty frocks with friends; social calls to make and quick stops to drop off cards at the homes of yesterday’s hostesses; naps; and then afternoon tennis in petticoats, long skirts, and parasols, or viewing the polo matches in nipped jackets, crisp shirts, and long skirts.

At home again they changed for a carriage drive, part of the daily procession along the ocean avenues, then into loose-fitting tea gowns for friends at five, and then a rest before arraying themselves in evening attire. Their corsets pulled tight, their sleeves puffed, their gowns smoothed over their hips, they slipped on their satin shoes, grabbed their lacy fans, drew in their breath, and proclaimed themselves ready to face the festivities: dinner at friends’, followed by dancing and midnight supper at the casino. One day required as many as seven different outfits and each one cost at least several hundred dollars.

For Astors, Belmonts, and Vanderbilts, Newport provided a broad stage on which to parade their riches. Miles of imported marble wrapped the facades, lapped the floors, and coated the walls of the Newport “cottages”; vast lawns greener than money led to the sea. In regal homes with names like “Beaulieu,” “Marble House,” and “Chateau-Sur-Mer,” crystal stalactites dripped from the chandeliers; broad staircases swirled to the upstairs chambers; satins draped the windows; and silks covered the plump sofas and thronelike chairs.

In these seaside palaces, the wives of America’s leading entrepreneurs lived like English aristocrats with their liveried servants and lavish balls. In the competitive urge to outdo one another, hostesses invited guests to sumptuous dinners where course after course was served on gold plates, and footmen stood behind the chairs, ready to fetch the salt. At one party, tropical fish swam in a pond down the center of the table; at another, guests were given tiny silver shovels and pails with which to dig for jewels in the sandbox that stretched from end to end. Even the guest of honor became a foil; the race was finally over when Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish announced the titled guest of honor, brought in a monkey in white tie and tails, and seated him at the table.